Authors: Brian Gratton, Arizona State University and Jon R. Moen, University of Mississippi

Date: 10/01/07

Basic Concepts & Definitions
Understanding child labor depends on both the definition of childhood and social attitudes toward the appropriateness of children working.  Each concept varies greatly between human societies, within any one society, and changes across historical periods.  In some societies, childhood ends as soon as sexual maturity is reached. Hence, no working person past that point would be a child laborer, even if they were quite young. In some societies, persons defined as children are expected to work.  Without thoughtful consideration of these fundamental parameters, the relatively recent rise (in historical terms) of antagonism toward child labor cannot be understood.  A variety of historical studies illuminate the historical record (Nardinelli, 1990; Humphries &Horrell, 1995; Tuttle, 1998, 1999; Cunningham, 2000; Hindman, 2002; Zelizer, 1994), and Basu (1999) provides a useful survey of economic research on contemporary child labor.

In lay as well as scholarly usage, child labor has come to mean an illegitimate exploitation of persons who, because they are children, should not work.  Such an interpretation would be utterly nonsensical to 18^th century Puritans, and remains nonsensical to many adults and children in agricultural societies in the developing world.  Even in the midst of the anti-child labor movement in the United States in the early 20^th century, reformers made very few criticisms of the often laborious and dangerous work of children on family farms.  The negative view of child labor as inappropriate has developed within rapidly industrializing economies, when, ironically, the actual incidence of children as workers declines from the high levels in agricultural economies. Thus, the common conceit that industrialization led to the abuse of children is the opposite of what occurred:  approval of children as workers was a pre-industrial assumption, one common to the 19^th century United States and to contemporary developing societies.  The rise of industrialization led to declines in the use of child labor, to strident criticisms of it, and, eventually, to its abandonment.

Importance of Topic to Work-Family Studies
Scholars in work-family studies ought to contemplate child labor, but not because children are gainfully employed in advanced economies.  Paid child labor in the United States is rare and that which does occur can be found among older children, as laws often permit. Farm work remains one area in which children still work, and again under dangerous conditions (Tucker, 2000)  Even at the height of child labor controversy in the United States, the proportion of very young children gainfully employed was surprisingly small, and among girls, practically nil.  In 1910, about 16% of boys 10 to 13 were gainfully employed, although this figure underestimates those who labored on family farms (for all gainful worker estimates see Gratton &Moen, 2004).  Among girls, the rate was about 8%. Moreover these figures are starkly inflated by a hidden fact in American child labor:  despite attention by reformers to immigrants who supposedly exploited their children, it was very young African American boys and girls who labored most.  This stands in stark contrast to  other ethnic groups, where gainful employment among young children was quite low.  For example, only 1% of Irish-origin girls aged 10-13 were gainfully employed in 1910.   For boys and girls aged 14-17, rates were much higher, reaching 56% and 25%, but defining persons of this age as children, or, if defined as children, as inappropriately working, would be anachronistic (Gratton &Moen, 2004).  Most state laws passed during the next 20 years, the period when state-based child labor legislation became widespread, set 14 as the legal age to work.

In sum, apart from the concerns of its contemporary application in developing countries, child labor is rare in the United States and other developed societies.   As we discuss below, a historical perspective on child labor, can open new considerations useful to thinking about children.  One important observation is that children do continue to work, perhaps even more rigorously than in the past. They do so not in the factory, but in the classroom. 

State of the Body of Knowledge

The moral opposition of scholars to “child labor” tends to obscure the great affinity between work tasks and educational tasks, and thus to undermine constructive research on how families demand contributions from all members.  The strikingly negative attitude of many children toward school in the early 20^th century provides a better guide to researchers on the similarities of adult demands on children’s time (Macleod, 1998; Nasaw, 1985).  A boy working in a Chicago factory told an interviewer that he didn’t like school because:

They hits ye if ye don’t learn, and they hits ye if ye whisper, and they hits ye if ye have string in yer pocket, and they hits ye if yer seat squeaks, and they hits ye if ye scrape yer feet, and they hits ye if ye don’t stan’ up in time, and they hits ye if yer late, and they hits ye if ye ferget the page.” Helen M. Todd, “Why Children Work: The Children’s Answer,” McClure’s (XL:1913): 73-74.

It is clear both from the present and the past that children are part of a family enterprise. In most agricultural societies, parents consider children to be not only useful as workers, but as assets for future protection in old age (Gratton &Rotondo, 1991; Gratton, 1996). Anthropological scholarship demonstrates•almost without exception•that children in preindustrial societies were thought of as workers, an attitude that extends to contemporary developing countries (Cain, 1983; Friedlander,Okun &Segal, 1999; Kertzer &Fricke, 1997; Caldwell, 1982; for a contrary view of how resources flowed, see Lee, 2000). In most developed, industrial societies, parents consider children to be useful as students and insist that they prepare themselves in schools for independent life. Schools take over the enormous task of supervision for much of the day and, while children are unlikely to directly finance retirement for parents, as a collective, a generation, they are essential to sustaining modern social security systems.

The transition away from employment in the labor force toward employment as students occurs especially as societies industrialize.  It is likely that the rate of child labor begins to fall with the rise of industrialization (Gratton &Moen, 2004), and it surely falls as industrial systems become more advanced.  With certain notorious exceptions, children are not efficient workers, neither particularly strong nor skilled, and they demand very high levels of supervision, as parents know.  Nonetheless, in the early stages of industrialization an attitude toward child labor as perfectly appropriate is carried over from the previous, agricultural, family farm traditions. Hence, children can be found at work, particularly in niches where their inefficiencies are less damaging (migrant farm work, service, mining, textiles, and crude food processing).  Moreover, poorer parents, especially those coming from rural economies where child work was a given, see children at work as a natural way to increase family income and prosper.  In the early twentieth century United States, measures of relative poverty, or the absence of a male head of household, invariably increased the probability that a child would work (Gratton &Moen, 2004).  These hardworking children do not help us understand the general trend away from child labor, nor do they represent the bulk of children workers on family farms, but they became in the United States and other countries the focus of child labor reform movements. 

What prompted the protest was the current application of an ancient practice, not an increase in the proportion of children working.  Much of the perception that industrialization increased the use of child labor, particularly in the United States, came about precisely because child labor was a common and expected practice in pre-industrial and agricultural economies.  Separating the home and place of work through industrialization, did not make child labor, particularly for pay, more widespread, but it did make it more apparent (Hareven, 1982).  Compounding the problem empirically was the tendency for census enumerators to be more likely to record a child working for someone else as having a gainful occupation (Macleod, 1998; Gratton &Moen, 2004).  A child working on the family farm was less likely to have an occupation recorded in the census, because such work was considered a traditional or normal part of life and not an occupation.  In more urban settings, a child working in a family business or a girl doing housework were also likely to be ignored as gainful workers by the enumerator.

The movement against child labor in the United States failed to achieve its principal goal of a national child labor law.  By 1915, however, state legislation outlawed the most abusive form of child labor, especially among children younger than 14, and states also required school attendance to higher ages. It is debatable that these laws had much effect on the already low level of exploitation of children, and similar legislation has had dubious consequences in contemporary societies (Moehling, 1999; Walters &Briggs, 1993).  The primary causes of decline in use in the United States and elsewhere were that more efficient systems of production required adult workers and that rising average income for male breadwinners made it less likely that families needed income from children to do well.  Nonetheless, Americans in general, and immigrants in particular, very quickly adopted the negative views that reformers had about child labor.  These views encouraged parents to set their children to schoolwork and may have contributed to the virtual abandonment of paid work for children. Contemporary studies show that social opprobrium has some effect in persuading parents not to send children into the labor force.

Implications for Research and Practice
The history of children as workers suggests that practitioners of work/family studies could profit by contemplating the continuity, rather than the dissimilarity, between past forms of work and contemporary applications. In both cases, children fulfill the desires of adults that they contribute to the family enterprise.  Adults in agricultural economies see children as useful workers, and they may continue to think so if they migrate to an urban, industrialized setting.  Opportunities for children to work are lower there, however, and there arises considerable pressure to not use children in this way.  Moreover, the opportunity to place them under the supervision of other adults in schools becomes increasingly attractive, both for their futures and those of their families. As adult earnings rise during industrialization, the relative contribution of child earnings to household income diminishes, as does the urgent desire to send them off to work.  Parents increasingly can indulge their preferences for altruistic behavior towards their children and send them off to school to improve their “quality” (Becker, 1991).  Children become aconsumption good rather than a source of income. Therefore, improving adult earnings is a vital path to eliminating the worst forms of child labor in developing nations today (Basu, 1999).   Higher satisfaction for adults comes from their children doing well and, at the same time, education becomes a prerequisite for the ability to earn any meaningful level of income. Children are thus enjoined to work hard at school.

References

Basu, K. (1999).  Child labor: cause, consequence, and culture, with remarks on international labor standards.  Journal of Economic Literature, 37, 1083-1119.

Becker, G.  (1991). A treatise on the family.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Cain, M. (1983).  Fertility as an adjustment to risk.  Populations and Development Review, 9, 688-902.

Caldwell,  J. (1982).  Theory of fertility decline. London: Academic Press.

Cunningham, H. (2000).  The decline of child labour: Labour markets and family economics in Europe and North America since 1830.  Economic History Review, 52, 409-428.

Friedlander, D., Okun, B. S., & Segal, S. (1999). The demographic transition then and now: Processes, perspectives, and analyses.  Journal of Family History, 24, 493-533.

Gratton, B.  (1996). The poverty of impoverishment theory: The economic well-being of the elderly, 1890-1950.  The Journal of Economic History, 56, 39-61.

Gratton, B. & Moen, J. (2004).  Immigration, culture, and child labor in the United States, 1880-1920.  Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 34, 355-391.

Gratton, B. & Rotondo, F. (1991).  Industrialization, the family economy, and the economic status of the elderly.  Social Science History, 55, 337-62.

Hareven, T. (1982).  Family time and industrial time: the relationship between the family and work in a New England industrial community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Hindman, H. D. (2002). Child labor: An American history. Armonk, NY:  M. E. Sharpe.

Horrell, S. & Humphries, J.  (1995).  The exploitation of little children: child labor and the family economy in the ‘industrial revolution.  Explorations in Economic History, 48, 485-516.

Kertzer, D. & Fricke, T.  (1997). Anthropological demography:  Toward a new synthesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lee, R. D.  (2000).  Intergenerational transfers and the economic life cycle: a cross-cultural perspective.  In A. Mason & G. Tapinos (Eds.), Sharing the wealth - demographic change and economic transfers between generations  (pp. 17-56).  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Macleod, D. (1998). The age of the child: Children in America, 1890-1920.  New York: Twayne Publishers.

Moehling, C. (1999).  State child labor laws and the decline of child labor.  Explorations in Economic History, 36, 72-106.

Nasaw, D.  (1985). Children of the city: At work and at play.  Garden City, NY:  Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Tucker, L. (2000). Fingers to the bone: United States failure to protect child farmworkers. Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch.

Nardinelli, C. (1990). Child labor and the industrial revolution.  Bloomington:  Indiana University Press

Tuttle, C.  (1998). A revival of the pessimist view.  Research in Economic History, 58 , 53-82

Tuttle, C.  (1999). Hard at work in factories and mines: the economics of child labor during the British industrial revolution. Boulder: University of Colorado Press.

Walters, P. B. & Briggs, C. M.  (1993). The family economy, child labor, and schooling: Evidence from the early twentieth century South.  American Sociological Review, 58, 163-181.

Zelizer, V. A. (1994).  Pricing the priceless child: The changing social value of children Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press.

 

Locations in the Matrix of Information Domains of the Work-Family Area of Studies
The Editorial Board of the Teaching Resources section of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network has prepared a Matrix as a way to locate important work-family topics in the broad area of work-family studies. (More about the Matrix…)

Note: The domain areas most closely related to the entry’s topic are presented in full color. Other domains, represented in gray, are provided for context.

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